As friends gathered in Hazel Stewart’s pebbledash bungalow offering
condolences for her late husband, they never suspected they were in the
middle of a murder scene.

Hazel Stewart leaves Coleraine Court with her second husband David yesterday. She had denied her part in a double murderPhoto: PA

By John Bingham

7:00AM GMT 03 Mar 2011

Only hours beforehand the living room in which they were sitting was filled with the smell of burning rubber as she frantically disposed of the hosepipe which had just been used to gas her husband, Trevor, in the fireplace.

It was just part of her role in an elaborate plan which enabled her and her lover Colin Howell to get away with murder for almost 20 years.

A farmer’s daughter from Omagh, Co Tyrone, where she grew up as one of 10 children, Hazel Elkin met Trevor Buchanan, in 1980 when she was 17.

The teenage couple were married within a year in the town’s Baptist church as Trevor followed several of his brothers into the ranks of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

With the birth of their daughter, Lisa, a year later and son, Andrew, in 1984, Hazel seemed set on a life as a housewife.

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But when Trevor was transferred to Coleraine, more than 60 miles across the Sperrin mountains, her outlook began to change.

Mrs Stewart would later portray herself as a shy country girl, with few friends who depended heavily on her husband.

But friends and neighbours remembered a different picture.

“She was very high maintenance,” recalled one former police colleague.

“I think she felt she might have married beneath herself, maybe she had assumed that Trevor should have been a superintendent by then.”

Peter Crook, a neighbour and friend of Mr Buchanan, recalled: “Trevor was a quiet man, no harm in him at all … but I think Hazel wore the trousers in the house.

“She was a strange person … a bit snooty, a bit stand-offish.”

A part-time job as an assistant at a local nursery when she was 25 gave her a taste of independence for the first time.

“I began to adopt a different attitude to life,” she later explained.

“I felt there was more to life than being in the home.”

It was there that she got to know Colin Howell, a figure who had already caught her eye across the pews at the local Baptist church where she was a Sunday Schoolteacher and he a youth leader.

Tall and brimming with confidence, he had a share in a dental practice in nearby Ballymoney and a large ranch-style bungalow on the other side of Coleraine.

Within weeks the pair had begun for secret trysts at her house while Pc Buchanan was at work.

When the affair was exposed, the church elders tried in vain to keep them apart.

But just before Christmas 1990 Hazel discovered she was pregnant and agreed to travel secretly to London with Howell for an abortion.

The strains on the two marriages continued to grow until the end of April 1991 when Howell first outlined his plan to murder their respective partners.

According to Howell, her main objection was that they would not get away with it.

“If I get caught I’ll slit my wrists before they come to get me,” she told him.

But her trial heard how she soon accepted her role including agreeing to drug her husband with a packet of sleeping pills before Howell was to arrive, arrange for the garage to be open so he could hide his car during the murder and prepare clothes to dress her husband’s body in afterwards.

It is not known whether she also hid Pc Buchanan’s RUC issue gun.

Later she was to cut up the hosepipe Howell would use to gas her husband and burn and change the sheets on the bed where he had been murdered.

When Elizabeth Hansford, the pastor’s broke the news to her the next day that her husband had been found dead, she sat emotionless, a reaction Mrs Hansford put down to shock. But others noticed her an apparent nonchalance in the following weeks.

“She didn’t come across as a grieving widow at all,” said Mr Crook.

“She a bit brass-necked – it wasn’t long before I saw her in the town with a man … We are not talking about years, it would be weeks, maybe months.”

That man was Howell as they resumed the affair and stayed together for another four years before going their separate ways.